had heralded the hunters' return yesterday echoed off the granite. A column of perhaps twenty goblins snaked out of the camp. They met the column at the bottom of the third-tier steps.
Their escort was made up entirely of male goblins, all toting spears and all lean to the point of emaciation. Amarandaris hadn't been exaggerating about the food situation at Dekanter. The Parnast refugees had more flesh on their bones than Ghistpok's elite. The refugees were better dressed, too-which said something about Parnast charity but wasn't truly surprising. Goblins weren't craftsmen. They might weave a reed basket or two, but not cloth. Goblin society, such as it was, depended on trade, raid, and outright theft. When Amarandaris backed away from Dekanter, he'd destroyed its prosperity and condemned it to dwindling rags.
Dru had calculated pure, physical hunger into his strategy, but he'd underestimated the effect that leather boots and whole cloth could have on desperate minds.
Grimy hands tugged his sleeves. One bold fool reached for his belt. He swatted the pest away and told them all firmly to keep their distance.
'Lead us to Ghistpok. We've come to talk to Ghistpok.'
The goblins squabbled among themselves, and one whose rags were a bit more extensive, if in no better overall condition, barked goblin language at Sheemzher.
'That one,' Sheemzher said, pointing at Druhallen. 'Speak that one.'
The escort leader brandished his spear a handspan in front of Sheemzher's nose and shouted more goblin- speak. Dru couldn't understand a word, but he got the meaning easily enough. Ghistpok's goblins didn't speak the Heartlands' dialect, or, more likely, they wouldn't speak it.
Peculiarities aside, Sheemzher spoke the Heartlands' dialect well enough and without Wyndyfarh's faintly foreign inflection, which implied that he'd learned humankind's common language here, in Dekanter. As Sheemzher should have learned it in Dekanter. A race could scarcely be called sentient if it didn't teach its children a useful dialect of humankind's trade language. Humankind shared Toril with many sentient races but outnumbered all of them together. There were sentients who didn't speak the trade-tongue, but Druhallen was quite confident that Amarandaris hadn't stooped to yips and snarls when he told Ghistpok to stop the warfare and raiding.
Of course, Ghistpok hadn't stooped either.
Before he started lording himself over Ghistpok's goblins, Dru wisely remembered that these scrawny ragpickers had survived the loss of at least three Zhentarim groups. Amarandaris had shut down Dekanter's slave market and relocated the Dawn Pass Trail rather than lose more men… or take the sort of revenge for which the Zhentarim were justly infamous.
Dru caught himself staring at the goblin who shouted at Sheemzher and asking himself if the ragged stranger's eyes were a little too large and red, his fingers a little too long? And could those marks on his face be scales, not scars?
'Sheemzher, your relatives don't seem to want to speak to us. Have we got a problem?' he asked when the tirade showed no signs of ending. 'Should we take our gifts and leave in a hurry?'
He watched the Dekanter goblins, looking for signs that they understood what he'd said. The signs were there: hands moving along a spear's shaft, quick glances exchanged between goblins, and longer glances at Hopper's flanks. They understood what he'd said, and they'd stopped speaking to men. Were they angry that the Zhentarim had disbanded the slave market, thereby depriving them of whatever goblins called luxuries?
Were they angry enough to kill? Amarandaris hadn't implicated Ghistpok's goblins in the massacres, but was believing Amarandaris any wiser than believing goblins?
Probably not.
The strongest wind blowing through Dekanter was confusion-the breakdown of goblin life as it had been lived for generations. Sheemzher confirmed Dru's perspective when he said. 'Many changes here, good sir. New people. New ways. Sheemzher listen, learn. No problems, good sir. No hurry. Sheemzher follow Outhzin. Good sir, all follow Sheemzher. Ghistpok soon.'
The goblin with the biggest rag collection was Outhzin and Outhzin led them across the quarry bottom. Dru had the sense that Outhzin thought he was in command. Outhzin could perhaps count twenty spears against three swords and was entitled to his opinion. Dru thought otherwise, but wasn't about to prove it; though he had fire, blur, and his pall of gloom literally on his fingertips.
The procession was quiet as long as they were on the steps, but once they reached the quarry bottom Ghistpok's goblins formed a circle around them and with words and obscene gestures made clear their fascination with Rozt'a.
The harassment came to a head when one of them-the same goblin who'd reached for Dru's folding box- darted into the circle and grabbed at Rozt'a's thigh. She backhanded her attacker, lifting him off his feet. By the time he stopped moving, he was on his rump and nearly six feet from where he'd started.
The procession stopped as half the goblins laughed and the rest leveled their spears. Rozt'a drew her sword.
'Druhallen-?' she called, making sure he was ready to back her up.
'I'm ready,' he replied and brushed his right hand along his left sleeve, plucking a cold ember from the cloth before he drew his sword partway from its scabbard.
The fallen goblin bounded to his feet. He snarled something at his companions that quieted them, then he pointed his spear at Rozt'a's gut.
'Tell him, if he takes one step toward me, I'll kill him. Tell him he needn't worry what happens next, because he'll be dead.'
Sheemzher dutifully translated and added, 'That one young, good woman. That one claim good woman. Good woman belong that one. Mistake, yes?'
'Belong to him!' Rozt'a sputtered. 'Is he out of his mind?'
'Sheemzher not know, good woman.'
'Well, you tell him-you tell all of them that I've got a good husband and a bad temper.'
Some of the goblins chuckled before Sheemzher translated a word, confirming Dru's suspicion that they understood the language they wouldn't speak. The instigator goblin wasn't laughing, or lowering his spear.
'When you're done with that, Sheemzher,' Dru said loudly, 'tell everyone that I'm her husband and that my temper is worse.'
He drew the sword and held it the way he'd have held one of his axe shafts. The stance must have been convincing. The instigator stood down, and they were moving again.
More goblins came out of the camp to meet them, mostly children, all of them boys. The goblin women stayed behind knee-high walls on the midden mound. A wearier collection of mothers and daughters Druhallen had never seen. Rozt'a fell back to walk beside him.
'This place turns my blood cold,' she whispered. 'The slave market hasn't closed. They've only stopped selling their women to the Zhentarim.'
'They never sold their women to the Zhentarim,' Dru whispered back. 'Count them. There are more males than females, but a lot more boys than girls.'
She did the arithmetic. 'There must be another camp.'
'I doubt it.'
'What-?'
'Shsssh. Later.'
Dru suspected that if they knew where to dig, they'd find too many tiny burials-or maybe the goblins didn't bury the daughters they chose not to raise. His own five brothers notwithstanding, sentient populations tended naturally to balance themselves between males and females. It took considerable intervention to create the disparity here in Ghistpok's camp. The brutal and ultimately self-defeating irony was that the same goblins who'd go to any length to enlarge their harems would reject their daughters. Women tended to be scarce when women were despised, and a race or tribe where men outnumbered women never camped far from brink of extinction.
The Dekanter goblins dwelt near that edge. They were still abandoning their daughters-witness the preponderance of boys running loose-but they were missing many of their adult males. The survivors-the goblins pointing their spears at the tallest woman they'd possibly ever seen-might think they were better off than their fathers, but Dru had studied trade and history; he knew better. Ghistpok's gender-skewed tribe was the strongest evidence he'd see to support Amarandaris's notion that there was a war going on in the Greypeak Mountains. Quite possibly a war of annihilation rather than one of conquest.
